What’s RescueTime?

RescueTime is a time direction &amp; Productivity software firm founded in 2008. The RescueTime program runs in the background of your devices automatically categorizing your activity, measuring and tracking.

RescueTime is a free app with a premium upgrade That allows more specific reporting and features like time input that is offline signal. It delivers a reporting dashboard with your data chopped, diced and sorted into graphs that are useful that will help you manage your time.

RescueTime requires time’s monitoring And makes it automatic and painless you actually track your time so that .

Nevertheless, there are dozens and dozens of Productivity &amp; time management tools online. What are the actual pros &amp; cons of RescueTime? Here’s what I’ve noticed through the years.

Disclosure — I get referral fees Mentioned on this website. Any data and/or remarks are all based on my expertise as a paying customer or adviser to a paying client. Rescuetime Promo Code

Rescuing Your Time

RescumeTime is a productivity tool at the to reiterate Feel that it helps your time-management abilities enhance. It collects data about the programs and sites you use, and then creates reports based on that information.

You create an account and set up a to Begin Desktop app in your personal computer (s) and a cell program on Android apparatus ) There’s no iOS program because the operating system prevents RescueTime from amassing the information it needs to carry out its purpose. Those apps quietly and invisibly track which programs you use and which sites you visit, as well as the quantity of time spent on them.

The tough nut to crack is how to make sense of all that information. To get the best results, you have to customize your accounts from the RescueTime website and tell the app more about what you believe productive versus unproductive action. The more you fine-tune it to your specific circumstances, the better your results. As an example, somebody who operates in the finances industry might classify reading financial news on web sites such as MarketWatch and FT.com as a productivity task, whereas for me, that is an unproductive use of time.

You can categorize website and each app on a 5-point Scale of quite effective, effective, impartial, dependable, and incredibly unproductive. You could even categorize activity into work categorizes. For instance, I record Google Docs as quite productive, and I categorized it as Writing, which is a subcategory of Layout and Composition. Looking at Redfin.com is very distracting when I am trying to function, and I have categorized it as such.

In the desktop app, there’s an easy set of controllers That allows you to pause RescueTime for 15 minutes, one hour, or until tomorrow, giving you easy access to switching the program off for breaks or days once you wrap up early.

Privacy

When faced with RescueTime’s proposal –We’ll monitor All you do and give you insights about your habits! –some people might, justifiably, worry about their privacy and the safety of information in their hardware. Should you use sensitive information on the internet or keep sensitive information in your computers and mobile devices, you’ll want to read RescueTime’s privacy and security statements carefully.

For everyone RescueTime’s privacy policy Contains a summary on very top, only a few condensed lines that are worth reading.

If your concerns are somewhat more relaxed and you simply don’t Want RescueTime tracking you on the weekend, you’ve got control over the days and times the program monitors your behaviour. You can easily set it to only watch your activity from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, or whatever schedule suits you.

Reports

I have used RescueTime for years, and I don’t check my Daily, productivity reports. I love to allow the service run in the background so that when I do want to find a better image of how I’ve been spending my time, a fantastic quantity of information is waiting for me.

When I do go through the reports, however, they’re Magnificent. I love the variety, providing you get multiple methods of understanding your productivity and customs, from bar graphs and pie graphs that show lump amounts of action, to line items of software you used.

1 simple but effective piece of advice RescueTime Supplies is an analysis of when during the day you tend to be the most successful. I wasn’t surprised to observe that my mind peaks in the morning and slacks off after 2:00 p.m., as that fits fairly well with what I know about my habits. If you have never analyzed your productivity, however, that may be a useful revelation for you, one that might help you schedule your days more .

The more time you use RescueTime Premium, the more useful the Data becomes, because you can see your statistics by day, week, month, or year. And as you might expect, you can toggle that times and days RescueTime records your activity so that it turns off automatically on weekends, for instance. Rescuetime Promo Code

Additional Features

Much of the value you get from RescueTime comes from what You make of the information and the way you use that information to influence your own behavior. Changing behaviour is tough, but getting rich insights does not need to be.

Among the ways RescueTime makes it easy to understand how To interpret all of the data it collects is with a Productivity Pulse score. This daily evaluation, shown as a percentage, comes in calculating the percentage of time spent on very productive, effective, impartial, unproductive, and very wasteful jobs. To be clear, no one is advocating you target for a 100 percent Productivity Pulse score.

A RescueTime blog article explaining the productivity Score notes that the typical score is 67 percent, and the average is 79 percent. Most people need to do some work which is not considered”very productive” throughout daily. The whole purpose of using RescueTime is to help you figure out how to focus on productive and incredibly productive tasks if you will need to and perhaps save less productive tasks for times as soon as your ability to focus has been waning anyway.

Tasks that are productive are not the Exact Same thing as distractions. RescueTime has a simple and smart feature for controlling behaviour, like getting sucked into websites that are distracting , also. A feature called FocusTime, when empowered, blocks your ability to access sites for a time period you specify. It requires a little setup and customization, but after it’s ready to deploy, it’s quite effective. As an example, let us say you want to finish a report, and also to make progress on it, you really need to concentrate hardcore for the next thirty minutes. It may block you from taking a look at email, posting on Twitter, checking sports scores, or other websites and actions, and switch FocusTime you deem deflecting.

The RescueTime mobile program has Automatically silence your phone whenever you enable FocusTime. Likewise, you can set up other automation with the help of third-party services IFTTTFree in iTunes Store and Zapier to obstruct or silence other distractions. By way of instance, you may create a rule with IFTTT (it stands for”if this, then that”) that says,”When I empower FocusTime, then automatically set my Slack standing to active.”

RescueTime also Provides you the Choice Idle time. Whenever RescueTime notices the computer has been idle for several minutes at a row, so it pops up a dialogue asking if you were at a meeting, on the phone, taking break, and so on, and lets you categorize the idle time accordingly.

Pros of RescueTime

Here is some of the advantages of using RescueTime Over solutions. Rescuetime Promo Code

Feature Set

At its heart, RescueTime does something — monitor time. If you look at it that way, it is not unique. Technically, you could do that with a spreadsheet or any of those dozens of programs online.

However, RescueTime’s attribute set The way that it monitors time and what it does with all the data (aka, you you’ll actually use).

RescueTime watches that windows have Action, looks at the window title, and instances the activity in this window. It is always running in the background watching.

100 monitoring, unobtrustive makes RescueTime rewarding. There is not any friction or hurdle to tracking time.

Since RescueTime’s monitoring feature solves that Problem, you’ll have data that is complete, correct & useful.

RescueTime’s other features focus on making their Core feature. Like time-tracking &amp; charging for 15, they don’t attempt to include. They do not attempt to get into any side businesses.

They do have Feature in an interesting manner. By Way of Example, the Get Focused! Feature blocks deflecting sites and/or apps from running when selected.

They have goals and alarms that Permit You to pick What when X occurs, you want to happen — and RescueTime will do this based on what it’s tracking.

I love RescueTime does Offline Time Tracking. Instead of being required to search and put in it 100% manually, then you pick a time period that’s unlogged and fill in the blank.

You can customize the buttons to make logging Offline time simple and quick.

It’s a feature set — but that Making it great. It is simple, easy and well-done.

Pricing and Plans

RescueTime offers two tiers of support: Lite (free) and Premium ($9 a month or $72 per year). Organizations or Firms that want to use RescueTime across a group of people pay the exact same speed.

RescueTime Lite offers lots for someone who has never Tracked his or her time before. The program monitors which websites and programs you use, and also how long spent on or in each of them. You may categorize every program and site you use on a Productive/Unproductive scale, also RescueTime creates a couple of primary reports showing the best way to spend your time. Lite members can set weekly goals, such as”spend hours per week on productive jobs and fewer than Y minutes on faulty items.” You can get a report email to you. For reports, you’re limited to a three-month history, however.

Subscribers get everything from the free Lite plan, Plus reports and extra features, including an report history. Premium comes with alarms you can enable for if you hit on daily goals. You can more correctly log time spent away from the computer, noting whether you’re in a meeting, on a telephone call, or just out to dinner. There is a Get Focused option, which lets you block websites you place. Rescuetime Promo Code

Assessing RescueTime’s cost to that of other apps Needs an open mind because programs do precisely what RescueTime does. Qbserve is one of the very similar apps you can find, and it costs a flat fee of $40.

We could, however, look at more Programs for freelancers who include tools for generating bills. HarvestFree in Harvest is a example. At $12 per individual per month for Premium, it costs more than RescueTime, but it has a very clear return on investment since it helps ensure more accurate billing. How you will interpret RescueTime’s reports and make better use of your time as a consequence is not as clear.

Another Classic program that’s, toggl Popular among freelancers, costs $9 per month, and in addition, it gives you clear tools for monitoring time spent on jobs with charging clients’ end aim. Toggl doesn’t include its own invoicing tools, but it has integration options for connecting with other invoicing services.

A Couple of programs are nearer to RescueTime in what they have to Provide, such as Slife, even though they have a tendency to have fewer attributes even if they are free (and Slife is).

Either way — RescueTime is a no-brainer pricing-wise. It’s totally free to use.

And if you are saved by the reporting/advanced attributes only One hour each month then it’s paid for itself even if you are only making US minimum wage.

RescueTime is an investment which makes sense.

App Quality

A problem with monitoring programs of all types is That they always must be on. The”always on” attribute can cause performance issues on notebooks &amp; desktop computers. Battery issues can be caused by it .

But in my experience, RescueTime causes neither. It’s running on my Windows PC my Macbook Pro, and also my Nexus 5x phone from startup. I have never tracked any performance or battery problems.

It is well-built and lightweight.

I enjoy the fact that the app does not demand Dozens of permissions that are absurd. It requires access to use data, but does not try to track contacts, location, emails, or some of those privacy that is normal violating permissions apps request.

It is quick to install and syncs using an online dashboard. It crunches the data quickly if you are on the Premium program or by next day on the plan that is free, and pulls at precisely the time.

Reporting

What’s the point of information if it can’t be interpreted by you Or place it to use? Rescuetime Promo Code

RescueTime’s accounts solves that issue — and in Ways is the purpose of using the program.

RescueTime’s Dashboard uses vibrant bar and Pie charts to show just what you are (and are not) doing.

You can Choose to receive emails reports every day, Week or even month.

And on Top of That, you can dig into the Reporting with filters and overlays to find your customs out.

It to determine that the amount of Time that each job takes.

When I working for a marketing agency in Atlanta — The time monitored to Instant Messages and Gchats was astonishing. It altered processes not only for me personally, but also my project supervisors.

Now that I’m on my own I can see the exact time I devote to tasks that matter. I am able to construct around those.

And Simply to reiterate the reports are Built-in to the computer software. The Dashboard is really on my default — as well as reports are pre-built.

It’s all seamless, fast and powerful so that you When analyzing your time, are wasting time.

Integrations

One of the selling points of RescueTime is their feature set minimalism. They do something and they do it nicely.

That said all people using their product Have software needs. Whether it’s charging, project management, team time tracking or something else — your time needs usually do not stop with measuring, monitoring and categorization.

To resolve that problem, RescueTime’s applications Integrates with a assortment of software. They have an API and integrations with applications that is shared.

Whether you are Time tracking into even a project manager that needs to collate staff member’s time or invoicing software like FreshBooks, RescueTime will probably integrate with this.

Disadvantages of RescueTime

Like any software however — RescueTime is Perfect nor is it the ideal fit for everyone. Here’s some pitfalls that I’ve noticed over time. Rescuetime Promo Code